Ed’s Note: Below are two additional responses, which did not appear in our printed issue, to Ms. Pappas’s article on being a Christian at St. John’s. You can see Ms. Pappas’s original article on page nine of Issue 14.

Questions are Indeed Skewed When One’s Perspective is Looking through CloudsBy Maxim Tucker A’15

To be one who is not searching for truth at this school is to not be truly at this school. To call what we do when we read a text “basic inductive reasoning,” is incredibly hurtful to those of us who sit poring over and over and over texts, and over once more just to be sure we have some semblance of an idea that we may grasp to in the heated ferocity of nineteen other incredibly bright and insightful minds tearing ideas and beliefs that we’ve held dearly for years to shreds in front of our eyes, often to our weak protests, and more often with our own help. The purpose of this college is not to “sharpen” nor make us adaptable to this world. Its purpose instead strikes me as destroying the parts of our world that work inadequately and saving those pieces of the world which are true, expounding upon them and attempting to form a world where those pieces constitute the majority of its fabric rather than its rare minority. Of course, destroying the entirety of your identity is not what seminar is meant to do, though it happens often enough to me. But, holding an Absolute seems to be the most damaging thing that one could possibly do in a seminar, the idea is to exchange ideas, not hold them as insurance against their almost assured refutation or alteration when thrown into the fray. And while the speech Mr. Januszewski gave the day of Orientation resonated personally with me and has been one of my favorite experiences so far at this College, I doubt very much that the mountaintop he was referring to was holding an Absolute in seminar, but more likely that when overwhelmed by the storm of ideas it is important to be able to distance yourself from it and have a calming place or activity, such as our wonderful sports program, or reading a NON-Program book and cozying up in a warm spot with a great cup of tea. To talk about “convincing ideas” each as “plausible” as the next, to say that this is why so many purport that “Everything is relative” is to misunderstand entirely the gravity, not only of the Program but what that statement itself implies. To not have the experience of believing with the entirety of your heart that all is governed by Forms and then have that belief smashed to bits by another “convincing idea”, or not have some other experience like it, is to have no experience of how hard it is to let go of a supposed answer to Truth that you proved yourself with the help of the college to be less than Absolute out of necessity for the growth of your soul. This is not to say that there is no Absolute, to get into an argument about the existence of God, merely that the existence of God should be part of the discussion in class as it pertains to the text, talked about as Gods or God relates to the text, and when we get to the current incarnation of the Judeo-Christian God in the Bible sophomore year,

then you can talk about the Judeo-Christian God in the Bible. For now though there are so many more interesting questions to explore, develop, argue, destroy and rebuild. And I couldn’t help but to instigate just such an argument about your statement Ms. Pappas, I disagree most of all, out of everything that you said in your article that “truth is in constant flux”, I believe it to be Absolute.

Your God Doesn't Want You WiseBy Wyatt Hope A’15 & Arya Eshraghi A’15

Last week the Gadfly published a narcissistic account of the Christian's pursuit for validation entitled “Questions are Different When One's Perspective is Standing in the Sky.” While it is generally in poor taste to publicly attack an earnest expression of religious belief, when such an expression is rife with conceit, generalization, and misrepresentation, a strong rebuttal is appropriate. We shall take Miss Pappas' statement, “This is the first time I am faced with opposing arguments. It is sharpening me, making me adaptable to this world and the people in it” as an invitation for refutation. To be first addressed are the wide generalizations found in last week's article. The community would love to see a source cited for the clearly insulting claim that “people graduate from St. John's either severely depressed alcoholics, or as Christians.” Further generalizations are made of the freshman class, that their first year at St. John's is “the first Logos they have come across.” We would like to remind Miss Pappas that for many of us this is not our first year at college, nor have we all lived in an environment absent of reason. Her claim that most seniors at St. John's are misologists is in dire need of substantiation. In her second paragraph Miss Pappas says “I haven't thought it all through.” I say, quit while you are ahead, because your God does not want you to think. “For in God’s wisdom, the world did not come to know him through wisdom. God was pleased to save those who believe through the foolishness of preaching,” as your champion Paul said himself. (1 Corinthians 1:21) A clear error is made in Miss Pappas' claim that Christian reasoning is inherently deductive while that of St. John's is inductive. How she came to this conclusion is not clear, but at any rate a correction is due. Aside from being a sweeping generalization (no one exclusively reasons one way or the other, but the method of reasoning depends on the problem at hand), it is strikingly inaccurate, for many works studied at St. John's (namely the axiomatic systems of Euclid and Archimedes) rely heavily or entirely on deductive reasoning. On the other hand Miss Pappas' philosophical approach is to accept a conclusion (that Christ is Lord) and then attempt to rationalize it through whatever means. This resembles inductive reasoning and makes a mockery of the St. John's Program and liberal education as a whole. As President Nelson wrote, “A liberal education begins with questions, not with answers. The St. John’s student is not asked to fit his or her answer to a question within a prescribed framework; The question is always considered on its merits, and, in fact it often turns out that the best response is another question.”

Indeed Christianity is inherently anti-intellectual, and incommensurable with the St. John's education. “For it is written: 'I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.'” (1 Corinthians 1:19) Miss Pappas evidently paraphrases 1 Corinthians 9:22 in her conclusion, that “we are all things to all people, so that they could be saved through us. This includes the misologist, the relativist, the atheist, and the legalist.” What Paul actually said was “I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some (τινὰς).” He makes no mention of the atheist, and Miss Pappas' assumption that the atheist might be included in the “some” has no substance. In admitting that she has exercised her intellect less than her soul, and that she is experiencing for the first time both Logos and opposing arguments, she is not in a place to claim that she “has already found the truth.” Numerous logical problems arise from the statements made in Miss Pappas' article, but problems of this sort only influence belief if human reason is trusted. She is faced with the decision to trust her own ability to reason, or to trust the foolish preaching through which she knows God.